Seeds
by The Hobbit's Rhapsody
Summary: In the Underworld, Persephone weighs the sunny fields and hills of home against the fierce longing she glimpses within her captor. — Oneshot. Companion piece to Asphodel.


**A/N: This is one fic of a duology—my fic "Asphodel" covers mostly the same events from Hades' perspective. This oneshot was four months in the making and reviews would be especially marvelous!**

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The darkness has frozen me. I stand perfectly still, hands at my side, my feet feeling as stone, as the figure before me lifts up an intricate crown—I think it may be made of silver and bone—and places it atop my unbound hair. The circlet settles on my head, lighter than I had thought it would be, and yet its very presence lays a heaviness on me.

I hardly know how I came here. I know that I was dancing, feet light, stumbling on the hilltop, unsteady, falling, just the way with which I am familiar. I know that it was warm, and birds were singing—and then there was a chill, and for a moment darkness eclipsed the sun where I stood, and now I am here. The lord of this place before me is cloaked in shadow, but the rings on his fingers would identify him even if I could not guess. This is the Underworld, and I have been abducted by the god of the dead.

There is a fire, so it is not overly cold here, though the light is shot through with blue and purple, and only a hint of white-gold hangs at the heart of the broad hearth. He beckons, and I follow with feet that do not feel the floor beneath me. He leads me to a table, so black I cannot make out whether it is made of polished stone or glass. An imposing chair of the same material, its tall back woven into the shape of a leafless spreading tree, stands at its head. Perpendicular to it is another, smaller, cushioned chair. It is this seat he pulls out for me in an incongruous act of chivalry.

The tabletop is laden with food. Fruits, breads, cheeses—all the sweet growing things one would expect to find in the upper world. There is no sign of meat, no sign that any conscious life was taken to provide my welcome banquet. I know not what I expected to see here, but I sit unable to even think of reaching for something. Besides, I ate well this morning—though I have no idea how long it has been since then. Having the sun blotted out has done nothing to help my biological rhythms keep track of time.

When I do not move, Hades takes it upon himself to serve me. His hand flicks out, quick and precise as an adder's strike, and closes around a round, carmine fruit: a pomegranate. Pomegranates were one of my favorites when I was a child, but I haven't eaten one in years, having turned since the onset of adulthood to the substance of more meaty fruits. I wonder if he knows this.

The god's already pale knuckles flush white as he squeezes the pomegranate until it splits nearly in two with a pop. Gently, he lays it on my plate.

"Please…eat." His voice is tender, deep, resonant.

I stare down at the fruit; does he think me as big a fool as that? Even mortals know better than to eat the food of the Underworld, if they are not already bound to this realm by their own death.

He takes food for himself, though he seems to be eating it more out of politeness than hunger. His jaw champs anxiously around a piece of bread, and for a moment a chill of fear clamps around my throat and I cannot breathe. Does my exercise of free will anger him? Would he force me to eat?

Despite his attempt to make appear otherwise, I might not have a choice. Anger pools in my belly—life with my mother was full of directives and rules, and I do not like the thought of being somewhere utterly removed from my mother's realm and still having no say in the running of my fate.

I brush a finger through the pulpy red interior of the fruit and draw it out again. Six rosy, dewy beads adhere to my fingertip. I imagine my mother's songs breathing life into the fruits and all her vast garden of growing things, and imagine these are her tears. What has she done, finding me stolen away? Does she know what has become of me? Aphrodite and Apollos should have been nearby to witness my abduction, but it would not be uncommon for my half-siblings to be elsewhere, never sensing a hint of my distress. If my mother knew where I was, she would be here by now, with my father's thunderbolts crackling against Hades' gates at her behest. I would have been rescued almost before my captivity had begun.

No, I am alone.

The burning presence sits across from me, white and vast in the mantle of shadows that hang everywhere. Green eyes flicker, as if embarrassed, when my own scissor up to meet them.

_He is lonely._

I hate the thought as it enters my mind, but at the same time I welcome it. I am grabbing ficklelessly at any reason I might have for hope, anything that I might use to understand this creature who sits before me.

This _man_. I can hear my own breath as I draw in a startled inhalation. _Hades._ He is a god, but he is also a man.

As I am a woman—I have seen a smaller fraction of the earth's endless turns than he, but I am not so _very_ young, though my mother would have me believe I am.

Gathering the dignity due me as a goddess, my heritage as a cloak—I am nearly Hades' equal in stature, after all—I stand.

"Let me see your face." It is the first thing I have said to him since entering his home. Somehow my voice is quiet but steady, and the green eyes narrow as it breaks the silence. He rises, and with a flickering of hands the shutter of shadows about him slips away.

I am struck breathless for a moment by how beautiful he is. It is a rough kind of beauty—not delicate, easily broken like everything I know in the living, mortal world. He is thick, pale, infinitely malleable and yet ageless. He does not look _old._ Yet neither is he young. He is a god, as old as the world. A mortal might be cowed, as they should be. Yet I am only amazed.

I return my gaze to my hand, where the pomegranate seeds, still damp, cling patiently. Six seeds. Will it be enough?

Do I want it to be enough?

Quickly I settle my mind, demand quiet and cooperation from the dark imaginings battering at the walls of my consciousness. I place the pomegranate seeds on my tongue and swallow in a quick motion without sucking or chewing.

I watch his throat bob as he swallows in tandem with me. His lips part, for just a moment, and I wonder what he is going to say.

At the very moment when I think we are going to fall from the apex of anxious waiting, tumble from stiff and taut silence into a hasty chaos of words and movement, startlingly white teeth flash over dark lips and he remains silent.

He remains frustratingly unreadable, and for the first time I lament my lack of experience with men, with people in general. I can speak with animals and translate birdsong, but I cannot read the emotions in a god's carefully controlled movements.

"What do you want of me?" I try not to show the fear that prickles along my spine as I say those words.

"I wish to make you a home," he says. Sincerity blooms in his face, I think.

Taken aback, I speak without thinking. I ask him for the sky; I ask him for the stars. As soon as it has left my mouth I understand it to be an impossible demand, in the underground kingdom of the dead, but somehow it does not seem an unfitting thing to expect of this hulking man who personifies the night. Neither does he seem overly perturbed by my awkwardly blurted request. He proffers a hand. I bring myself to touch his arm, settle my fingers on his sleeve—I think it is his sleeve, but the difference between his skin and his mantle of shadows is hard to discern.

Gliding beside one another like some lord and lady touring a temple, we do not walk far. He takes me to a jet of stone overhanging a cavern, more vast than I can fathom, and he shows me his night sky: the souls of mortals, like thousands upon thousands of silver heads of grain in a field of ebony. The Asphodel Meadows, I think this must be, where the mortals who were neither very good nor very evil in life spend their eternity. I could not have imagined this here, innumerable flames of pale light wandering among great stone flowers, wandering through the reward for their earthly lives.

It is not a night full of insect chirps and frog calls, but there _is_ life here, after a fashion. And to the eyes, it is indeed beautiful.

Hades is like stone at my elbow—I steal a glance at him. He too stands looking over the field of souls, with a wistful look in his eyes. I wonder if he ever wishes on souls the way my mother taught me to wish on stars.

Could I love him, if I tried? Dared?

Suddenly a sounds clangs out above us, near where I first entered, I think: a ferocious knocking, a howling, crying. For a moment the foreign clamor of sound, so unexpected in this peaceful realm, shocks me, and then familiarity washes over me as I take a moment to separate the howling of Hades' watchdog and the interloper's voice, and I hear the voice clearly. I know exactly what's happening even before Hades turns to me and speaks:

"Your mother's found you."

In a moment he's taken my hand, and there is something far more violent about this motion even than when he grabbed me bodily before. Now I can see the restrained passion in his limbs, feel the flexing and trembling of his muscles underneath his half-gloved skin. Now I have seen his eyes, green with longing; I have heard his voice, thick and low and seductive and frightening.

I am not moved only by shock, but sympathy.

In the world above, I lived in the sun. My mother's wings were always about me, her wheat fields and orchards a bower to shield me from the world. She would have kept me ever in her gardens, never looking on eyes like these.

Does she know? Did my father ever look at her the way Hades looks at me now? Has she known the rabbiting of a heartbeat in her chest?

I am afraid. But I do not think it is my mother who can soothe that fear.

Hades and I both, I think, have known what it is to be lonely, though he has a kingdom stretched beneath his feet and I have my mother and the fauna of her home to keep my company. My mother has cradled me in her arms, sung to me, told me all the stories I asked for until a mortal's throat would be hoarse. It occurs to me that Hades is unsure, too; that he offers me all he knows, and he has nothing else. My father has bedded a hundred women, but I have never heard a single tale of Hades so much as granting one a smile. Perhaps he is as ignorant of love as I, if a little less innocent of desire.

Perhaps we are kindred spirits…the King of the dead and I. So very strange.

I have already made my choice. He placed an offering before me, and though I was not hungry, I took a sampling of his offering. Six seeds. Will they bind me here, in the darkness?

Eternity is mine, but I know too little of it. I know too little of desire.

I will let the Fates choose for me.


End file.
